May 1971
So it says in the records, but that’s actually a lie. In fact all his papers are a lie, concocted in a dingy back room in Kolkata off of a dangerous alley by a man with a squint. He’s never had a screening. Wouldn’t Uncle Sam have a cow if he knew!
In 1971, Sanjay had had to go into hiding. The Naxals had had a bitter falling-out with CPI (M). As a student leader, he was an easy target. He remembers those days, shunted from host to reluctant host, hiding under beds, terrified every time someone knocked on the door. He didn’t even dare to phone Bela to let her know he was alive. Then one day, like magic, Bishu called him from America. How did he even know his phone number? Go to Barabazar, Shonu. Look for Sarfaraz. Give him my name. Tell him I’ll make sure he gets the money.
And just like that, abracadabra, chi-ching-fank, he was on his way to America, armed with fake documents and a fake job offer. When the plane took off at Dum Dum Airport, he shook with exhilaration and terror and an illogical longing for the city that had brought him little except trouble. It felt as though someone had reached into him and was wresting out his heart. In later life his sorrows would be deep-drawn and bone-aching sad, but never like this. Perhaps only the young can feel such exquisitely intense pain.
On the flight, he was stuck in an uncomfortable, last-minute middle seat. He leaned toward the small oval of the window, wanting to look down at Kolkata one last time, the city where Bela lay in bed. What would she do when Bishu’s friend delivered his note to her? Would she find the courage to leave everything she knew for the sake of love? The fat man in the window seat grinned unsympathetically. Nothing to see, he said, pulling down the shade. Two a.m., everyone sleeping.
Something’s wrong. He forgot to check the clock when he came into the doctor’s office, but he’d bet his bottom dollar that he’s been waiting for over an hour now. Why are none of the other patients concerned? Don’t they have a life? Well, he, Sanjay Kumar, has places to go and things to do, and he’s getting ready to give someone a piece of his mind.
Do you wear a seat belt while driving? Do you wear a helmet while riding a bike?
Yes
He’s not stupid. He chooses his risks and pleasures, weighs them against each other. Most of the time he gets the formula right, though the divorce—that hadn’t quite turned out the way he thought it would, had it?
Have you ever had a sexually transmitted disease?
No
And he never plans to. He’s told his women, including his current girlfriend, that they have to take a test up front, or else it’s no go. He’s fair about it; he offers to take a similar test himself. If they’re not okay with this, well then, it’s so long farewell auf Weidersehen goodbye. A clean and simple system. It works for him because he knows how to enjoy people without getting mawkish about it—a good skill to have.
He just wishes he’d learned it earlier in life.
Do you drink alcohol? How many drinks per week?
He’s going to ignore this one. What kind of fool counts his drinks? That would defeat the purpose of drinking, which is to float above consequence, or at least create a brief belief that such a thing is possible.
What directives do you have in place for the end of your life?
He ignores this one, too. In fact, he’s done with the entire bloody questionnaire. He walks over to the receptionist, who’s back behind the glass wall, fiddling with something on her computer. He bangs the clipboard down on the countertop and gives her a feral grin when she jumps.
“We’ll call you just as soon as we can,” she says in answer to his query. He’s willing to bet they’ve been specially trained to talk to patients in this neutral-as-oatmeal tone. Especially when they’ve made them wait beyond reason. He stomps his dissatisfied way back to his seat. If they don’t call his name soon, he’s walking out.
About that unanswered question: he’s got an excellent directive in place, but he isn’t about to tell anyone about it. Loose lips sink ships. That’s one of his favorite sayings. He’d taught it to Tara when she was little, and it had become her favorite, too.
For a while, he’d been going to the doctor, to several doctors as a matter of fact, with gaps in between so they wouldn’t get suspicious. He complained to them about pain, about his inability to fall asleep. Lies, every one of them. He slept like a buffalo after a long day of tilling fields. Snored like one, too, according to his girlfriends. The doctors gave him pills, which he stashed away safely in different parts of his house, to be used all at once when he really needed them. But then he did some research and realized they might not be enough. He wasn’t going to gamble on this one. He contacted a man who had connections in Mexico. Now he has enough Nembutal to send a horse to heaven. Sanjay Dewan is not going to end up in a wheelchair, eating mush and peeing his pants and being pushed around by an ugly bitch of a nurse with a mousetrap for a mouth—like the one who’s just entered the waiting room to make an announcement.
The doctor has been delayed at the hospital, says mousetrap-mouth. One of his patients is in the ICU. Life-or-death. They’re not sure when he’ll be able to get to the office. If your problem isn’t urgent, we suggest you reschedule.
Three patients zombie-shuffle to the counter.
Sanjay considers it, too. But then he remembers how it felt last night, an evil genie grinding his lungs under its heel. He thinks of his girlfriend’s face, the bumblebee questions she’ll ask. She’ll probably drive him right back.
He’ll wait another half hour.
Here’s another question, just when he thought he was done. He’s not sure where it came from. Maybe it emerged from behind the water cooler? It hangs eye-level in front of him.
Name one human mystery.
That’s not difficult:
Why people do things.
After he had recovered from the malaria, he asked Bishu what had made him come to check on him. What made him go, that same day, to their history teacher and tell him what was happening. What made him describe Sanjay’s condition with such vivid distress that a concerned Lal Ratan Babu made a trip to Sanjay’s house and demanded to speak with Sanjay’s uncle.
Bishu shrugged his shoulders. He wasn’t a big talker, those days. I don’t know. He kicked his patched old football at Sanjay so they could play some more before it got dark.
I don’t know. Wasn’t that the truth.
Years later, a cannier Bishu, revisiting the incident, would come up with a shitload of motives. Just like Sanjay could, if asked why he had wanted Bela to run away from home and join him in America. Or why he quit his perfectly nice computer programmer’s job to take on a life of investments so risky that for years they teetered between flush and broke. Why he decided to divorce Bela. Why he has the PI keep tabs on Tara. But the truth is, he doesn’t really know why he did any of it.
Here comes another question, twisting lazily in midair.
Describe an incident you regret.
Regret is an idiotic emotion indulged in by masochists, and he for sure ain’t one.
Except there was this one time.
Soon after he decided to get the divorce, even before he told his wife, he drove up to the university where Tara was studying. He wanted Tara to know first. He wanted to explain to her why he was doing it. He wanted to make sure to get her on his side before Bela poisoned her mind with lies and tears.
He took Tara out to Niko’s. Personally he would have preferred a fancier place, but it was the girl’s favorite restaurant. One of these days he was going to work on her taste, but today he just wanted her happy. He let her order everything she wanted: stuffed grape leaves, hummus, moussaka, gyros, baklava, the works. She loaded up her plate. She was chattering away, excited, waving her fork, talking with her mouth full. It was almost the end of her first semester of college; she had settled in; she liked her professors. My roommate’s a pain in the butt, though. I can’t wait until next year, when I can move out and get my own place. You said I could, right? Now she was describing a psychology class, so
me experiment about delayed gratification with children and a cupcake. It didn’t make sense. His head was too full of his own words, how to phrase them. He interrupted her. Started on the speech he had rehearsed in the car.
She put down her fork. She pushed back her chair. He thinks there were tears in her eyes, but maybe it was the glitter of rage. You’re leaving us? Her plate was full of food. She’d had only a few bites. Are you having an affair?
Sit down, he told her. Don’t be melodramatic. He considered confessing that there was another woman, but that wasn’t the real reason for the divorce. The real reason was more complicated. It was because Bela had betrayed him already. That was why, each morning when he awoke and looked at her placid, sleeping face, he felt like he was drowning in sawdust.
Instead, he assured Tara that he wasn’t leaving her. You’re my sweetheart baby and always will be. But she walked out midsentence. He remembers her plate, the red-brown moussaka bleeding into the creamy hummus. She’d arranged the dolmades in a neat heap, a small green mountain. She liked to save them until the end because they were her favorite.
He wishes that he hadn’t been in such a hurry to talk, that he’d waited until she’d finished her meal.
They’d met again on the day when he was moving out of the house. Bela had forced Tara to come home from college, hoping that her presence would make him change his mind. Hah! To think he was going to let Bela manipulate him like that! Tara hadn’t said a thing, though Bela had cried and carried on enough for all three of them.
Their last conversation took place on a day when he’d followed Tara to her job. She’d dropped out of school by then and was working in that iffy thrift shop. She’d turned to face him outside the graffitied entrance. She wore clothes that were too loose for her, in shades of drab. She’d lost a lot of weight. A ring pierced her left eyebrow. He couldn’t take his eyes from its small, violent shimmer.
“Baby,” he said. “I love you.” When she didn’t respond, he said, angrily, though he knew he shouldn’t, “It’s not all my fault. Ask your mother. Ask her. She betrayed me a long time ago.”
She looked at him, her eyes opaque and disbelieving. “If you follow me again, I’m going to call the police.” Her voice was newly grown up, emotionless as paper.
What is something that makes you feel guilty?
Where did this one come from? Sometimes when he can’t breathe right, things begin to blur. Is that what happened here? No matter. He answers it quickly:
Nothing.
A lie, of course.
After that confrontation with Tara at the thrift shop, he’d backed off. But he couldn’t stand not knowing, so he hired the investigator. Paid him religiously for years, even through the lean times. Followed his daughter’s life that way. It was about as satisfying as a starving man staring at glossy food photos.
The news was not encouraging. Tara got into bad company. Drank. Did drugs. She moved in with a loser, some kind of masseur, then moved out. The investigator thought the guy had cheated on her. Sanjay wanted to kill the bastard. Things got worse. An abortion. Two years later, a car accident. He longed to help, but he could do nothing except watch from the sidelines and agonize. And send her checks.
She never cashed them.
Then—amazingly—not too long after the accident, she straightened herself out, went back to school, graduated, found a decent job. How did that happen? Even the investigator couldn’t figure it out. She even reconciled with Bela. That was a low blow, when Sanjay had been the one who wanted her the most, who’d been ready to give her everything she could possibly want.
Tara got married. Had a kid, who was ten now. Slowly, slowly, Sanjay allowed himself to relax, one muscle at a time. He started carrying, in his wallet, courtesy of the PI’s zoom lens, a photo of the boy, whose name was Neel. Pulled it out to show to his friends like a real grandfather.
A month ago, abruptly, Tara quit her job. Or maybe she was fired. Now she was seeing a shrink.
He paid the PI a chunk of money to find out why.
The man was good at what he did. But finally, yesterday, he had called Sanjay to say that he couldn’t get hold of Tara’s medical records.
It would have been bad enough had Sanjay known what was wrong. Not knowing was a hell of a lot worse.
Later that night, as he was trying to make it through the worst breathing episode of his life, it struck Sanjay that although he didn’t know what exactly Tara’s problem was, the cause was blinding-clear: Her father, her guide, the one person she’d depended on, had abandoned her. He had made himself the center of her life, and then he’d left.
The light in the office is very dim. Maybe they’ve turned it down to save on electricity? It’s grown cold, too. Shivery-cold. He’s had it! He’s not waiting around in this godforsaken place any longer, answering more of these weird questions. He pushes past a uniformed woman who’s trying, what audacity, to stop him. He’s going to get in his car and go home. Tomorrow he’ll find a different doctor, one with a better notion of punctuality and a normal medical questionnaire. If he walks slowly, he should be fine. Level 4 of the parking structure, space 434. He remembers it perfectly. Yes sirree Bob, his heart might be flip-flopping like a beached fish, but his mind is a scalpel.
What is the nature of life?
He wasn’t going to answer any more questions, but this one—he’s ready for it. He’s been over it many times, lying awake in bed alone or with a sleeping stranger’s arm (the same thing) draped heavily across his chest.
Life is lines of dominoes falling.
One thing leads to another, and then another, just like you’d planned. But suddenly a domino gets skewed, events change direction, people dig in their heels, and you’re faced with a situation that you didn’t see coming, you who thought you were so clever.
The first falling piece is etched in his memory.
It was a few months after Bishu’s divorce. Sanjay and Bela hadn’t moved to Texas yet. They were still living in that dingy apartment in the Bay Area, and Tara was a baby. Sanjay had come home in a good mood that evening, though he has forgotten why. He’d opened the door, whistling, and seen them together on the couch, his wife and his best friend. For a moment, it made him happy.
It had always troubled him that Bela never liked Bishu. Things became worse one year back, after the incident with the tenant. Bloody redneck. Wouldn’t pay rent. Wouldn’t move out of their house. The house that was Bishu and Sanjay’s one-and-only, in which they’d sunk all their savings. Things got hairy. They couldn’t make the mortgage. The bank sent them a warning. It looked like they were going to lose the house. Finally, Bishu poisoned the tenant’s dog and everything worked out.
When Bela discovered what had happened, she threw a fit. She wanted nothing to do with Bishu, never see him again. Of course, Sanjay couldn’t give in to a ridiculous demand like that, not after all that Bishu had done for them both. They had a fight, a big one. Bela didn’t talk to Sanjay for days. She would lock herself in the bathroom when Bishu came, leaving Sanjay to stammer out excuses.
But now they were sitting close to each other, Bishu’s arm around Bela’s shoulder, talking in low voices. Baby Tara—she was maybe eight months old then—was balanced on Bishu’s knee.
When she noticed Sanjay, Bela jerked away with a start.
“My mother’s sick.” She pointed to an open aerogram on the table.
Maybe she was telling the truth. Maybe Bishu had only been comforting her because he found her crying. Maybe he, Sanjay-Shonu-Shona-Sheno, was overreacting. There were crumpled balls of Kleenex strewn on the floor.
Bull, said the voice in his head. The way she’d pulled away, the way she’d raised her startled eyes to him, Sanjay, standing in the doorway, then glanced down: That wasn’t sorrow. It was guilt.
The next week, he came home from work one evening to find that Bela was gone. But her car was in the parking lot. Where could she be? He paced the balcony for an hour, worrying, wondering if he should ca
ll the police. Then he saw Bishu’s car drive up. Bela spilled out, laughing in a green silk sari. Sanjay hadn’t realized how pretty she’d grown in the last few months, having shed all her pregnancy weight. Bishu leaned into the back and picked Tara up from her car seat. She patted his face with her palms, babbling baby talk. Bishu smiled and nuzzled her neck. It made Sanjay furious. Ashamed, too, in a strange way. He stepped away from the balcony before they could see him. Went into the bathroom. Only after he heard them enter the apartment did he come out, flushing the toilet needlessly.
Bela looked at him with wide eyes. “Sorry we’re late. We got caught in traffic.”
“Where were you?”
“I went to the temple in Livermore. It’s my father’s death anniversary today. I didn’t feel comfortable driving alone all that way, and I know you don’t like to go. So I asked Bishu-da.”
He stared at Bishu, who had insisted, all through college, that religion was the opium of the people. Who had never set foot in a temple in India.
Bishu gave a shamefaced shrug.
“I couldn’t let her drive all that way with Tara all by herself,” he said. “Could I?”
Yes, you could, Sanjay wanted to shout. Instead he said, “Would you like some tea? I picked up that chai masala that you liked so much last time.”
Later, when they were alone, he said to Bela, “You never visited the temple on your father’s death-day before this.”
“People change,” Bela said, shooting him a cool, unreadable glance from beneath her lashes.
What did she mean? Was she hinting at something? Now she lifted her chin, as though daring him to hit her. He didn’t know what to do, so he grabbed the baby, who was in her lap. Tara, startled, started to cry. A look flashed across Bela’s face, clear enough this time: fear.
This, he thought. This would be the way to punish her.
He swung Tara up, turning around and around and making airplane noises until she gurgled with laughter. He changed her diaper, which he usually shied away from. When it was bedtime, he said, “I’ll take her.” He stood at the crib, making little finger-circles on Tara’s back until she fell asleep.
Before We Visit the Goddess Page 18